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2.1.2-Maedhrys
Brick!Club 2.1.2: Hougomont Hi. Here I am, because you guys enticed me to read Waterloo and I went through it all in one sitting and I have some things to say and Pilf has been wanting me to join you guys anyway so. Yeah, here I am, falling in love with a digression. Such is the court whose conquest was Napoleon’s dream. This bit of earth, if he could have taken it, would have given him the world. Hugo is really big on the importance of the small here/throughout the section. One individual, one word, a couple hours, one bit of earth, and destiny is changed. He talks a lot about God determining (for various reasons) that it’s Napoleon’s Time To Go, but I also get the sense that the tiny aspects of the world are rising up against him even as the greatest condemns him. The bit of earth will not be taken, small as it is. This idea is reaffirmed a little later: The English fought there admirably. The four companies of guards under Cooke held their ground for seven hours, against the fury of an assaulting army. Did the English have military might in the battle? Yes, they did. But what prevents Napoleon from conquering the bit of earth that could give him the world is a mere four companies arrayed against an army. The chapel served as blockhouse. Fitting in the sense that a blockhouse was a place of refuge and security; far less fitting because…well, that makes it a scene of war. There’s a paragraph not long after that seems to me to throb and ring with symbolism, but I can’t quite figure it out… There was a massacre in the chapel. The interior, again restored to quiet, is strange. No mass has been said there since the carnage. The altar remains, however—crude, wooden, backed by a wall of rough stones. The fact that no mass has been said makes sense on a basic level—I mean, who would want to?—but I find the contrast with the abiding altar to be very telling. People no longer come there to invoke the presence of God, but something of the divine remains, nevertheless. Four whitewashed walls, a door opposite the altar, two little arched windows, over the door a large wooden crucifix, above the crucifix a square opening blocked with a bundle of straw; in a corner on the ground, an old glazed sash all broken—such is the chapel. Near the altar hangs a wooden fifteenth-century statue of St. Anne; the head of the infant Jesus was knocked off with a musket shot. The French, momentary masters of the chapel, then dislodged, set it on fire. The flames filled this ruin; it was a furnace; the door was burned, the floor was burned, the wooden Christ did not burn. The fire ate its way to his feet, whose blackened stumps can still be seen, then it stopped. A miracle, say the country people. The infant Jesus, decapitated, was not so fortunate as the Christ. The fire stopping at Christ’s feet makes me think a bit of him walking on water, but the “blackened stumps” bit has more negative implications. I know this is a bit heavy on the symbolism, but we are reading Hugo, so—perhaps something like, in their desperation, they inhibit his ability to walk among them? That last sentence, though. I stopped there for a while because I REALLY want to understand it. It’s one of those Hugoisms for sure, but I’m not sure what it means that the war has damaged the infant Jesus more than the crucified Christ. The only association that comes to mind (and I’ve been thinking on this for a while) is that of childhood with innocence, which would necessarily die in a battle such as this, and the idea that Christ on the cross is already bearing the suffering of the world, including what takes place in the chapel. Thus, how would it harm him further? Anyway, getting away from the religious symbolism talk, I’ll just note that the end of the chapter—the list that leads up to “and all so that today a peasant can say to a traveler, ‘Monsieur, give me three francs and I’ll describe the battle of Waterloo!’”—really got to me. Commentary Pilferingapples YAY YOU ARE HERE and I am…mostly not. BUT YAY YOU I WILL TRY TO COME BACK EXTRA MUCH. Treblemirinlens You are here!! Love your thoughts on the significance/symbolism on the damage to the statues of Christ and infant Jesus. Look forward to seeing further brick!club posts from you! :) Pilferingapples See THIS IS WHY I WANTED YOU TO JOIN US, all the religious symbolism! And history! Thank you for rooting around that Jesus/Christ fire thing, I wasn’t sure what to do with that— that battle can destroy innocence but not erase redemption, or something? YOURS IS WAY MORE POETIC. …Also I should probably keep a running tally of the times a commenter says some variant on “This may actually not be a metaphor, But Hugo.”